The Platinum Ticket by David Beynon

Monday, 31 March 2008

The Fiction Writer's Workshop resumed after a two week hiatus. This week's discussions centred around plot. My favourite quote of the evening is an unattributed one as follows:

What do your characters treasure most? Put it at stake and let your characters fight for it.

Think about any story that has captivated you and odds are the above quote applies.

During the workshop we also took a look at the last assignment from our workshop on Point of View. There were two choices from that workshop. The one I chose was as follows:

Please use the past tense for this exercise. One to three pages.(Any point of view)The lobby of a swanky apartment building--the doorman is opening the door for a female tenant just as a man walking a small dog passes the entrance. A potted plant falls from a sixth floor window narrowly missing the woman. The dog strains at the leash and paws through the remnants of the potted plant.

Quite the springboard. It actually ended up being 8 pages but once I started I had to keep going. I had a lot of fun with this one and it can be found over at the fiction notebook. I called it The Rat Dog.Those who know me will recognize my long standing dislike of diminutive canines is creeping into my fiction. I have long held the belief that if it's smaller than a cat then it forfeits its right to be called a dog. And then there are the cat-sized ones that fall into the realm of what my friend Diane calls "kickin' dogs". I guess anything less than knee height falls into this category. Anything higher than the knee technically qualifies as a dog but if I need to stoop to pet it - well, that's iffy.

I'm happy to report that Loremaster's beginning has been rewritten and with some luck and hard work the manuscript will be revamped in short order. So far the story remains the same with a healthy portion of house-cleaning and technical corrections. Looking forward to getting it submitted so I can move onto something new...